Optimal Design of Dependable Control System Architectures Using Temporal Sequences of Failures.pdfVIP

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON RELIABILITY, VOL. 58, NO. 3, SEPTEMBER 2009 511 Optimal Design of Dependable Control System Architectures Using Temporal Sequences of Failures Joffrey Clarhaut, Blaise Conrard, Saïd Hayat, and Vincent Cocquempot Abstract—Designing a dependable control system requires accu- ACRONYM rate methods to evaluate efficiently the dependability level of one AFPS Automatic Fire Protection System given component architecture. This evaluation is crucial to deter- mine the risks associated with system failures, and the remaining BDMP Boolean Logic Driven Markov Process properties after fault occurrences. The dependability level of a con- DL Dependability Level trol system depends not only on the kind of component failures that may occur, but also on the ordered sequences of the failure ap- FMEA Failure Mode and Effect Analysis pearance. Classical evaluation methods, i.e. Fault Trees or Failure PLC Programmable Logic Controller Mode and Effect Analysis, are not appropriate to handle these se- quences. Our paper contributes on this aspect, and proposes a com- RRC Relative Reliability Coefficient plete design methodology for dependable systems. This method- ology uses ordered sequences of multiple failures to evaluate ac- NOTATIONS curately the dependability level of all possible system’s equipment architectures. Starting with the hierarchical functional decompo- set of systems sition of the system, the first step is to identify the dreaded events.